Sunday after Theophany. Our Venerable Father George the Chosebite (610-41). Our Venerable Mother Dominica (474-91). Emilian the Confessor.
Ephesians 4:7-13; Matthew 4:12-17.
Read Ephesians 4:7-13
Christ is born! Glorify Him!
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
That poem, The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, was written in 1919 as post-World War I Europe was coming apart at the seams. It could have been written yesterday. There is nothing new about times like these.
Having just stated in the preceding three verses that there is a center that will hold – “one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all” – in today’s reading St. Paul goes on to show God’s provision for making it hold – the spiritual gifts and offices of the Church.
We and the Church we constitute are not immune to the disorder, division, and dissolution of this world; sometimes we have been leaders of it. But the Church is structurally constituted to provide a lasting form within which our relationships and activities can be lived, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”
We tend to deride institutions as dead things; relationships are seen as living. But Frederick von Hugel compared the institution of the church to the bark on a tree – there’s no life in it, it’s dead wood, but it protects the life within.
As Eugene Peterson wrote, “when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn’t last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it’s prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.”